Organic SEO was once a meritocracy--not that long ago, either.
Back in February, I talked about "the soulless algorithm" that defines search-engine visibility and how to accomodate its calculations while remaining creative. My point was that an incisive choice of words that mirrors the common lexicon of a targeted market has the capability to generate visibility in search engines and excite and convince an audience about your offer's value in equal measure. In simpler terms, I said smart writing delivers results.
I mentioned, then, that search engines influence what we, as writers and marketers, offer them in concomitance. I promised to tell you more about the syntactical evolution your offer requires to stay relevant in the market and to the search terms your targets enter.
As it turns out, online marketing is trending away from that syntactical evolution, but only within the context of what creative marketers offer. Where you may have been able to lead the majority of your market--and, thus, your searchers--into entering sequences of words you created for them, now search behavior leads the creative mind and the digital marketer more than ever.
Organic SEO is becoming a democracy--and that means you need a lot of people to prefer your offer in order to generate the results your position-based angle generated in the past.
Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insight at Edelman, the world's largest PR firm, writes for AdAge [account required] about how sites earn search visibility more than ever these days:
. . . the search-engine landscape is shifting. Today consumers are far more likely to seek out and, what's more, trust what they read on other sites rather than anything we put out. The reasons are both technological and sociological.
He cites two new kinds of search, reputational and social. Reputational search isn't anything new to most of us, but it recognizes that as online media grants growing credibility to blogs, social-media pages, and aggregators through increased PageRank, writers and marketers need to apply SEO concepts to traditional PR materials that appear online. His tactical triumvirate of research, content development, and measurement is old hat for SEO copywriters, but offers a new approach for PR professionals.
Rubel breaks ground when he discusses the importance of social search, though:
As more searches take place inside social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, brands that are early adopters in building out "embassies" will be more visible.
There's no doubt that brand reputation today is incresingly shaped by sites we don't control. This means that even a nascent field such as search-engine marketing must change in order to survive and thrive.
Rubel ends his thoughts with the mention of requisite change, undoubtedly so that readers engage with Edelman to learn more, but I like the idea of exploring the thought with you further here at Flightpath.
Essentially, social search means search benchmarks are powered by the people. SEO copywriters and digital marketers must meet the audience on its turf and on its terms, in all senses of the word. We have to calibrate our message to keywords the masses use within their own worlds.
As digital marketers, our traditional website and social-media pages must match the vertical and social engines' expectations. Our blog posts have to satisfy the topical markers--the words--the audience promulgates. Our tweets must integrate their hashtags. Our voice is now the brand voice plus the voice of everyone in the world who already cares about our common interest, that is, our offer to them.
The fine modicum of control we may have enjoyed as creative market leaders still exists in part--Google will never die, and natural search results will always matter--but, more and more, the future of search is in the hands of the people.
